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Updated: May 12, 2025
But most unromantic and incongruous, most disheartening to a dreamer of Oriental dreams, was what I learned a few days later when the awakening had really come that among the first cars ever to cross the desert was one purchased by the Hutukhtu, the Living Buddha, the God of all the Mongols. When the Hutukhtu learned of the first motor car in Mongolia he forthwith demanded one for himself.
The world is more or less acquainted with the events in Urga in December, 1911, and the proclamation of independence of Outer Mongolia with Jetsun Dampa Hutukhtu as its ruler.
Although to foreign eyes and in the cold light of modernity the Hutukhtu and his government cut a somewhat ridiculous figure, the reverse of the picture is the pathetic death struggle of a once glorious race. I have said that unaccustomed luxury was responsible for the decline of the Mongol Empire, but the ruin of the race was due to the Lama Church.
Then the Mongols rode away, silent with awe at having been blessed by the Living God. All this under a blazing electric light beside an automobile at the foot of the Bogdo-ol! The Hutukhtu seemed to feel that it became his station as a ruling monarch to have a foreign house with foreign furniture. Of course he never intended to live in it, but other kings had useless palaces and why shouldn't he?
Loobitsan had never seen Peking and was anxious to go. When General Hsu Shu-tseng made his coup d'état in November, 1919, Mr. Larsen and Loobitsan came to the capital as representatives of the Hutukhtu, and one day, as my wife was stepping into a millinery shop on Rue Marco Polo, she met him dressed in all his Mongol splendor.
The other two at least have the virtue of native architecture. In the main palace the central structure is white with gilded cupolas, and smaller pavilions at the side have roofs of green. The whole is surrounded by an eight-foot stockade of white posts trimmed with red. The Hutukhtu seldom leaves his palace now, for he is old and sick and almost blind.
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